بررسی عوامل موثر در مدیریت زنجیره تامین پایدار با استفاده از دو کشور آسیایی به عنوان نمونه Investigating the Influential Factors of Sustainable Supply Chain Management, Using Two Asian Countries as Examples

Introduction DRIVEN BY REGULATION, MARKETING AND PUBLIC FACTORS, SUSTAINABILITY HAS BECOME AN INCREASING CONCERN for companies of all sizes and across a wide range of industries (Seuring et al., 2008). Since the 1990s, governments and corporations have spent decades debating the necessity and impacts of adopting sustainability in industries (Bontoux and Bengtsson, 2015; Fiksel, 2003; Renner, 2008; Renner and Worldwatch Institute, 1991). For example, the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997 and became effective in 2005. The protocolˈs first commitment period started in 2008 and ended in 2012, but failed to reduce greenhouse gases emissions as expected (Clark, 2012; Gelis, 2015; Haya, 2012). Although the second commitment was then extended from 2012 to 2020, the Kyoto Protocol still faces resistance from the developed countries. However, there is hope for the situation to be reversed. The struggle of getting a consensus among countries seems to improve gradually. Getting 177 nations to sign the Paris Agreement at the Earth Day 2016 to keep on controlling the global warming and carbon outputs starting 2020 is a tremendous success for sustainability. It illustrates that most countries around the world have steadily embraced green ideas after 20 years of raising public awareness. Currently, with the rising concern for the environment, many enterprisesˈ business strategies have moved from the local or internal optimization of sustainability to the integrated operations of upstream and downstream suppliers (Kleindorfer and Saad, 2005). This kind of strategy or evolving concept leads to flourishing progress of the sustainable supply chain. As a result, sustainability and supply chain management (SCM) are unceasingly merging and becoming increasingly important to various industries. However, the adoption of sustainability from the concept to the practical implementation of supply chain is still immature in many fields. One of the root causes is that the subject involves the convergence of multiple disciplines, where challenges and issues arise (Linton et al., 2007). Many companies, at the beginning, were driven to adopt sustainability in their supply chain because of regulations, public pressure, potential marketing advantages, cost reduction or long-term profitability. Though the top managers understand more about sustainability, they may be more hesitant to implement it because of unfamiliar challenges and unknown risks. What are these challenges or risks from industrial perspectives? For instance, defining the goal of a sustainability supply chain is not an easy job. Short-term goals such as creating sufficient and instant benefits might sharply conflict with long-term ones, e.g. long-lasting efforts to improve the lives of the next generations (WCED, 1987). Another example is that the up-to-date implementation of sustainable supply chain requires lots of operating resources, time-consuming negotiation and external cooperation with the upstream and downstream. Third, thorough investigation on the potential impacts of sustainability in aspects such as finance and profit are inevitable for every company. Fourth, the complicated relations between sustainability and SCM go beyond just economic considerations and the way in which people understand and implement practices with only limited knowledge, experience and tools (Filho, 2004; Zhu et al., 2008a, 2008b). Therefore, in order to solve the concerns or challenges of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), researchers have argued that extrapolating SSCM influential factors from industries is an essential step for SSCM adoption (Gold et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2012b; Sajjad et al., 2015).